Financial planners split the years after work into three speeds: go-go, slow-go, and no-go. The labels are theirs. The ages are mine.
The travel years, while the knees and the nerve hold — Machu Picchu was a rehearsal. These are the years the whole plan was built to buy, and they are front-loaded on purpose: everything I priced in the appendix at the deluxe level gets spent here, not saved for later.
The trips get shorter and closer, and the spending slows down on its own — nobody has to budget it down. The mortgage is already gone by then; it ends in 2049, before the slow-go years even start, and the house costs taxes and insurance and nothing else.
The quiet years. Spending is at its lowest, the VA carries the medical, and the portfolio — if the lines in the plan are anywhere near right — has long since outrun what I can spend.
The three speeds, on my plan: go-go 57–69, slow-go 70–79, no-go 80 and past the edge of the chart. The spending slope eases down across all three; the guaranteed floor — pension, VA disability, Social Security — runs level underneath.
Work one more year and the balance grows — I know exactly how much. But the go-go years do not grow. There are about thirteen of them. Work to sixty-two and five are gone — spent at a desk, in the most able-bodied years of the thirteen — to add money to a plan whose floor already covers the life. That is a trade I can price, and I decline it.
82 is where the spreadsheet stops. It is not where I plan to.